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So I am running an Aliens Unlimited campaign and crashed them on a "primitive" planet, specifically HU Earth. Did this with immediate goals in mind, no real thought to an overall campaign. And now I'm trying to figure out one. Important note, there are two ways off the planet, one is for them to wait out a specific time and not upset the superhero organization that is dabbling in spaceship construction, the other is to steal the shuttle of a villain that followed them, which would require them to come up with a plan that impresses me, otherwise the villain has GM fiat for a little while (killing him is a common goal, which they don't have a lot of, so I want to draw it out).

One idea that I keep coming back to is near the end of their stay bring in the apocalypse and turn it into a survival game. I've looked over Nightbane and Chaos Earth (I would tone down the MDC to keep the HU feel). But both are very human-centric. The way I've interpreted HU is that walking down the street you could see anything - mutant humans with obvious mutations, mutant animals, the occasional cyborg, and stranded aliens trying to pass as one of the above. Even if you're a normal human, your boss may have an exoskeleton and his secretary may have cute cat ears and a cat tail and your brother-in-law might be green.

That makes Nightbane very difficult. If there are already "monsters" walking down the streets of Manhattan, the post Dark Day paranoia is not going to be high enough to elect a police state politician. Which means after the initial shock, there would just be another supervillain in town to beat back.

Chaos Earth has its own problems. While some groups would insist a person look totally human before offering protection, other groups would welcome anyone that can shoot straight, as the demons described were very animal-like in their behavior and that would separate the good "monsters" from the bad "monsters". And there would be no beginnings of magic and psionics as its already there and formalized, the only trick would be figuring out which experienced mage is going to play babysitter to a bunch of ley line infused kids.

I feel like I'm trying to put together a jigsaw puzzle with the pieces coming from three different pictures.

Any advice for working around the problem I see? Is there another setting that I could use instead that I'm not thinking of?

Dead Reign and Systems Failure are both apocalypse scenarios you might look into, too. Another thought is to have the characters time travel through the apocalypse event. Enough time has passed that mutants and such are no longer tolerated and/or around, due to initially unknown events that transpired while they were away (a "purge" or "last stand" or some such).

You could disguard the idea of borrowing from other settings and comming up with one of your own: plague, nuclear holocaust, asteroid collision, ect. You could also draw from non-Palladium sources for and idea for your apocalype setting. Stephen King's "The Stand" comes to mind.

For my most recent D&D game, I had the sun go out. That forces people to retreat to the underdark to survive. I'm assuming that the world has the equivalent of earth's geothermal gradient, which would allow life to persist even without a sun. Ideally, I'd like to take the game to a huge conclusion where one of the player characters manages to achieve apotheosis and assumes the role of the sun god.

I'd just make it all up on my own. I'd steer clear of Dead Reign and Chaos Earth.